David Ross is relieved to hear my voice, my accent and my unconscious habit of sprinkling an “eh,” here and there, in my patter, and at my wider understanding of the current woes of his beloved Vancouver Canucks, an NHL team that, beyond the soul-stirring natural beauty of the province he left behind, is among the things that Mr. Ross misses most about Canada.

DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS

“I did a radio interview recently with a station in Kelowna, B.C., and the whole time I was thinking, ‘God, the host is so easy to understand,’” Mr. Ross says, laughing. “We’ve lived in England for almost 10 years and I was worried about having lost my Canadian ear. But you speak the way people are supposed to speak.

“What I am wondering is: how do I sound to my British friends?”

Well, he sounds like your everyday hoser from the north end of Kootenay Lake. But then he is not, because “everyday” implies that he is ordinary and Mr. Ross and his wife, Rosemary, and their two Canadian-born kids, Garett, now 19, and Claire, age 13, are highly unusual. Different. A little wacky, you might even say, and their British neighbours and friends in Upper Rissington (not to be confused with nearby Little Rissington) would probably agree with you, since it takes a different kind of family to chuck their life in Canada to chase their father’s dream.

DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS

Mr. Ross’s ambition was to visit every single historic site in the United Kingdom. The family has been at it now for 15 weeks a year — for almost 10 years. If you are counting in monuments visited, that translates into some 2,000 statues, memorials, medieval battlefields, Saxon churches, Lord and Lady of So-and-So estates, Celtic holy places and, lest they be forgotten: drafty old castles.

“I took a family trip to England as a kid and I just thought it was so romantic,” Mr. Ross says from his home in the Cotswolds.

“It felt like home. And before we had the kids Rosemary and I biked around the southwest of the country and I thought, ‘I could really live here,’ never actually expecting we would.”

DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS

Mr. Ross, a Newfoundlander by birth, and a self-admitted British history nerd was, in 1999, a stay-at-home dad living north of Nelson, B.C. In his imagination, however, he was elsewhere, in an England peopled by Arthurian knights and chivalrous deeds and rolling hills and cozy cottages and village pubs.

Rosemary Ross, meanwhile, was paying the bills working as a hospital administrator in Kaslo, B.C., while her husband daydreamed. And yet the history geek had an actual plan, and suggested they pull up stakes and move to the Old Country. There was more to the scheme than mere whimsy. Mr. Ross started a website, Britain Express, in 1996, obsessing over all things Britain: Architecture, culture, history, famous dead people and famous abandoned places, a daily history quiz, travel tips and reviews and accommodation information — the sum of which became a go-to spot for would-be travelers and Anglo nuts.

DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS
DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS

By 2004 the site was generating enough income to allow the Rosses to abandon B.C. for their postcard-of-a-village in the Cotswolds. A decade later the Anglo wannabes are more Anglo in terms of their historical knowledge and geography explored than their Anglo neighbours.

“My wife and I went for a 20 minute walk last weekend to an 11th century church, next to a ruined abbey,” Mr. Ross says. “Then we followed a trail peasants used in the medieval period to a Saxon church. We are walking in the footsteps of people who have been walking this route for how long?

‘‘It is heaven to me.”

And it is plain, well, boring to the natives, who are often taken aback by the Canadian interlopers’ enthusiasm and ask: What the heck are you guys really doing here, before expressing their own unfulfilled desire to move to Canada.

DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS

“I guess it is a grass-is-always-greener thing,” Mr. Ross reasons. “I’ve had lots of people tell me they want to move to Canada, and why wouldn’t they? Canada is great.”

Great. But not Stonehenge great, and not a nation where, if you close your eyes and dream, the little boy inside of you can storm the nearest castle. The only thing lacking is hockey pucks.

“I love Canada, and I really miss hockey, and I miss the scenery and my old friends,” Mr. Ross says. “But it just feels like we were supposed to be here.

“England feels like home.”

DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS
DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS
DAVID ROSS/BRITAIN EXPRESS